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£20.00
The year is 1907 and Maurice Ravel is one of the most admired young composers in France. In Belle Epoque Paris he cuts a charismatic, dandyish figure, whose technically flawless music hides a deep emotional core, and whose unpredictable talent is as hard to pin down as his mysterious personal life. When Ravel’s devoted acolyte Mylo encourages him to take on a new pupil – a rising British composer called Ralph Vaughan Williams – an unlikely cross-channel friendship starts to blossom. The two men could hardly be more different. Ralph is down-to-earth, married, and currently engaged in a long-term project of collecting forgotten British folk songs – a musical form in which Ravel has no interest. All they truly have in common is that in clear but indefinable ways, each of them seems an archetypal representative of his own country. But as the shadow of war approaches, their friendship becomes entwined with Mylo’s own tragic story.
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£25.00
Most of the details of our ancestors’ lives are forgotten, lost in the mists of time. Yet there are many sources – fireflies – that survive to illuminate our understanding of the past. In this case, those fireflies are paintings. In this insightful book, Alice Loxton travels across Britain in search of 21 extraordinary paintings. From the wall art of St Cadoc’s Church near Cardiff and the exquisite detail of daily life portrayed by L.S. Lowry to landmark works including ‘The Rainbow Portrait’ of Elizabeth I and Millais’ ‘Ophelia’, Loxton creates a fresh, transformative history of Britain. Considering each piece from the viewer’s perspective, she explores how it feels standing before them, what they are trying to tell and what their real-life inspiration reveals about the period when they were created.
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£25.00
We are a nation of villages, from the rural, picturesque hamlets of Castle Combe and Clovelly, to the tight-knit urban communities of Leeds’ terraces and Cricklewood’s backyards. Villages link us with our past and are the stuff of art, poetry, folklore and song – and for many they offer a place of community and sanctuary. And yet Britain today is one of the most centralised political systems in Europe, with decisions on local matters made by national government and local communities feeling increasingly disempowered and disconnected. In ‘The Village in Britain’, Simon Jenkins, author and former chair of the National Trust, delves into the past, present and future of this powerful national symbol, and argues that we need to find a way of embedding the qualities of the village into our modern lives.
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£22.00
It is 1965, and the Cold War has never been colder. The Circus – the secret centre of British intelligence – has one prize asset left in Moscow: a senior Red Army officer with access to the enemy’s deepest secrets. But when a British agent is shot in Helsinki, George Smiley uncovers a Soviet operation that imperils this irreplaceable source. The trail leads Smiley not to Berlin or Vienna, but Los Angeles – the most foreign place he has ever known. There, in the murky heart of US intelligence, a Communist sleeper agent – a ‘Taper Man’ – is poised to expose Britain’s operative in Moscow. To save him, Smiley must navigate an America riven with political tension, all while his spy in Leningrad, Roy Bland, risks everything in pursuit of a Russian defector who holds the final piece of the puzzle.
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£18.99
London, 1911. Coronation fever. Suffragette unrest. A city crackling with tension. When a policeman is found brutally murdered on the streets of Kensington, blame falls on the three women seen fleeing the scene. Their sole witness? Stephen Pike: ex-borstal boy, under-butler extraordinaire and assistant to the most unconventional detective in London, Miss Decima Stockingham. Sharp-tongued, fearless and bored of behaving herself, she’s the only one able to see that this case is not what it seems. Aided by an invisible network of maids – their eyes and ears in every house in London – this unlikely duo must catch the killer before time runs out. But in a city dazzled by ceremony and divided by change, you never know what might be lurking in the shadows.
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£20.00
Spanning decades and continents, from revolutionary 19th century France to Istanbul, Egypt and Beirut, this is a profound meditation on creativity in times of political crisis and war, asking what literature can hope to offer when the world feels broken. Building a fascinating bridge between Western prose and Eastern poetry, this story offers a luminous portrait of the life of an iconic writer, Gustave Flaubert, author of ‘Madame Bovary’, told through the lives of the women – both real and fictional – who shaped him.
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£25.00
The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response from America – unknown to the public – would be to use nuclear weapons. ‘Redwood’ is the story of how at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of British and American governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot and prevented Armageddon.’Redwood’ was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly-trained six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB’s deepest secrets, compelled to swap sides by a shaming secret of his own. Facing exposure, with both the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and his own KGB colleagues closing in, he demanded that MI6 try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape pla
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£20.00
Cold War Moscow is a place smouldering with secrets. Gabriel Dax has been tasked with delivering a mysterious Blanco drawing to celebrated defector Kit Caldwell. But Caldwell is convinced the KGB suspects him of treachery, and he wants out now. When Gabriel is ordered by his enigmatic handler Faith Green to help, he is pulled into a web of shifting loyalties and dangerous escape plans. As tensions rise and trust fractures, he is forced to confront the fine line between devotion and deception.
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£25.00
On 5 January 1066, Edward the Confessor’s death plunged the nation into a succession crisis that would indelibly change England forever. Mere hours after Edward’s remains had been laid to rest, his brother-in-law Harold II seized power, inciting the wrath of two formidable challengers: King Haraldr of Norway and Edward’s ambitious cousin, William, Duke of Normandy. In this startling new history, Dr Erin Goeres unveils the intense drama that unfolded over the tumultuous nineteen days between the Battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings in the Autumn of 1066, and which led to the deaths of two monarchs, ending a centuries-long Anglo-Scandinavian rule. Drawing on sources from England, Normandy and Scandinavia, Goeres uncovers complex histories, characters, and motivations.
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£16.99
Munich, 1937. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor have arrived in Germany for a historic meeting at Hitler’s mountain retreat. But recent attacks by ruthless Communist band, Red Freedom, has brought fear and bloodshed to the area. As brutal as the Nazis, their next targets are Edward, Wallis and the Fuhrer himself. Detective Sebastian Wolff is charged with their protection, but the conflict between his job and his politics becomes even more complicated when Wolff realises who is behind Red Freedom – Ulrike, his first love and the mother of his son.
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£30.00
Between 1931 and 1949, a series of crises broke out that threatened collective security, world order and the internal cohesion of states across the globe. At the heart of these crises was a world war that shook the foundations of global power, a watershed moment in the history of the 20th Century. ‘Collapse’ is the first volume of an authoritative trilogy that tells the story of the Second World War through this international lens, covering theatres of war in multiple continents and analysing worldwide trends. Through new sources in 14 languages and from over 50 archives across the world, Professor Jonathan Fennell examines the first part of this ‘long war’, from 1931-1942, and explores what it really meant to live through this violent time. Using an innovative approach which explores the personal alongside the political, the global alongside the local, he shows how a world that many considered civilised collapsed into barbarity.
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£20.00
Sage Deverill, an unhappily married young woman, escapes from her brutish husband and equally unpleasant mother-in-law with her son and flees to her grandparents’ estate and equestrian grounds in Newmarket, the headquarters of the racing world. There Sage finds solace in the bond she forms with a tricky racehorse in her grandfather’s care, and she also encounters Rafe Dunbarton, a handsome, intriguing trainer from just the other side of the heath. But just as Rafe and Sage take the first tentative steps towards love, her vengeful husband crashes back into Sage’s life in a tangle of destruction and lies.
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£25.00
The Lifesavers were a small number of men and women who during WW2 were at the forefront of global progress in saving lives through collecting, preserving and courageously delivering blood – trailblazers whose work was then adopted around the world. This tiny and short-lived service (1939-45) created ground-breaking advances to improve survival rates with an impact comparable to the discovery of penicillin. In this compelling story from historian Roderick Bailey, we meet the nurses who built and tapped the bank of volunteer donors (1.5m registered by the end of the war); the unsung technicians responsible for storing, preserving and moving the blood; and the specialist medical officers who risked their lives in traversing battlefields across the globe to give transfusions.
Rajasthan 
